May 7, 2016

"This I understand because I have the taste myself as large, as largely, as any one. I have pleasure in the use, on fit occasions, of—traitor, coward, liar, shyster, skulk, doughface, trickster, mean cuss, backslider, thief, impotent, lickspittle.... A perfect writer would make words sing, dance, kiss, bear children, weep, bleed, rage, stab, steal, fire cannon, steer ships, sack cities, charge with cavalry or infantry, or do anything that man or woman or the natural powers can do.... I like limber, lasting, fierce words. I like them applied to myself,—and I like them in newspapers, courts, debates, congress. Do you suppose the liberties and the brawn of these States have to do only with delicate lady-words? with gloved gentlemen words? Bad Presidents, bad judges, bad clients, bad editors, owners of slaves, and the long ranks of Northern political suckers (robbers, traitors, suborned), monopolists, infidels.... shaved persons, supplejacks, ecclesiastics, men not fond of women, women not fond of men, cry down the use of strong, cutting, beautiful, rude words. To the manly instincts of the People they will forever be welcome...."

Whitman spoke like an earlier version of Trump because Whitman was also giving voice to an implacable will to be strong and free men. That is what made America Great the first time.

It started with Andrew Jackson defeating the murderous British in the West to save the Mississippi River Valley, and then took off with Robert Fulton building his steamboats and DeWit Clinton building his canal locks to go over the Niagara Escarpment at Lockport, NY to complete a transportation circle from New York City to the Great lakes and then down the Mighty Mississippi to New Orleans. And which soon saw Robert Morse building his single wire telegraph to carry the news.

Trump is a messenger and a builder. And nobody cares if he says bad words in his battle to make America Great Again.

Man, you wanna see rude! Take a look at the speeches that the politicians of the Confederacy wrote about each other when it started to become clear that The Great Cause was going to be lost.

Attacks on personal & family character, on faith (lots of anti-Semitic remarks about Judah P. Benjamin), on the wedlock status of a man's birth, questions of even basic competency & loyalty --- it all came out in the open when it started coming time to find who was responsible for the present disaster.

After 1865 Whitman was only more impressed. There was then a new Inter-continental Railroad and a suddenly there was a free Northern military force greatly trained and no longer busy with other duties. At that point the patiently waiting British Empire had to abandon their military plans to fight us again over made up Canadian boundary claims, especially in Washington State.

"Trump is a messenger and a builder. And nobody cares if he says bad words in his battle to make America Great Again."

Trad-guy has been nibbling the weed cookies again. let me fix that sentence for you.

Trump is a pathological liar and a demolition expert, bankrupting four companies and failing to run a dozen more businesses at a profit. And conservatives are rightly concerned that his solipsismal, adolescent worldview will surely destroy America as we have known it.

Trump is also like Brom van Brunt (Brom Bones), the alpha male in Washington Irving's "The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow." Trump made all the GOP candidates look and sound like Ichabod Crane. In the end, Trump always gets the fair Katrina van Tassel.

There is rich tradition of Trumpian figures in American lit predating even Whitman.

No other human being seemed as multifaceted to Whitman as Lincoln. The President, he said, had “canny shrewdness” and “horse-sense.” He seemed the down-home, average American, with his drab looks and his humor, redolent of barnyards and barrooms. Whitman commented on the “somewhat rusty and dusty appearance” of Lincoln, who “looks about as ordinary in attire, etc. as the commonest man.” Whitman was excited that “the commonest average of life — a railsplitter and a flat-boatsman!”—now occupied the presidency.

So if he were alive today - Walt Whitman would dislike Donald Trump as much as I do.

Walt Whitman was a NYC Values realist. That included being an admirer the feisty trial lawyer from Kentucky and Illinois who upheld the War effort until his office and the War's loss approached in the November, 1864 Election.

Then General Sherman's flanking tactics miraculously won the reelection and thus the War at the two day Battle of Jonesboro, Georgia starting on August 31, 1864.

The big Statue of Sherman on a horse stepping on a Georgia pine bough is the center of the War Memorial Plaza, outside the Plaza Hotel. It is the biggest Civil War Memorial in Whitman's realist New York City.

There are plenty of live epithets in the real world and on TVs. All you have to do is turn the TV on and you will hear plenty of profanity that are full of life.

You "issue" is not that there are not enough rude words in the world, but that there are not enough rude words in New York Times, in the textbooks, in the court opinions, and in the president's speech, etc. But then again you seem to take great offense at the slightest hint of disrespect for you here and also have a knack for "detecting" such on New York Times & Co and engage in the most twisted kinds of "PC Policing" when your preferred persona is the subject. It has been well established that those who detest "Political Correctness" the most are also the most sensitive kind to what they perceive to be a disrespect. (See Donald Trump)

I suggest you look in the mirror and see how much "life" and "liberty" you see in there.

With all due respect for words, given the habits they have contracted in so many foul mouths, it actually takes courage not only to write but even to speak. A pile of old rags not to be touched with tweezers -- that's what we're given to move, to shake, to turn about. And all that in the secret hope that we'll keep quiet...[I]t is necessary to shake yourself free of the soot of words and that silence is as dangerous as possible in this system of values. There is only one way out: to speak against words. Drag them along in shame to where they lead us, and there, they will be disfigured. There is no other reason for writing...One can only escape it by a degrading cowardice which my taste finds intolerable.

Because the possibility of losing a return due to a huge number of hungry birds, when you can cover the trees with antiuccelli organize? Here there are chances for the anti bat netting, winged creature knit and ensuring feathered creature.